


Unconditional

by CheerUpLovely



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Brother Feels, Brotherly Love, Childhood Memories, Gen, Loss of Parent(s), Pre-Vampire, Vampire Turning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3436496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheerUpLovely/pseuds/CheerUpLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon had no experience of unconditional love that he could recall.</p>
<p>He thought, as Stefan grew, that this little brother might be his chance for unconditional love. His mother had two sons to love, but Stefan only had one brother. No more children followed Stefan into the family, and from the moment Stefan could walk he was following his brother around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unconditional

Damon had no experience of unconditional love that he could recall.

Damon knew his mother loved him, it was something he was taught from the moment he could learn – that a mother’s love was stronger than anything else imaginable. No woman would ever truly compare to a mother. The only thing was that most of her lessons bled through that before marriage to his father she had once been a schoolteacher. Once she had married she had stopped working to become a mother, and then Damon had become part of her life and she had to fit him in between other household tasks.

But there were women who came to cook for them, and clean for them, and women who came to care for Damon and put him to bed at night, and as Damon grew he wondered what his mother did when she wasn’t with him, where she went, who she spoke with. 

She taught him though. She taught him how to appreciate kindness to animals and to other people. She taught him how to comb his hair and fix his clothing correctly – even the buttons – and how to keep himself clean and tidy. She taught him how to entertain himself but to stay quiet enough as not to disturb his father. She taught him how to please his father so that he might be allowed to spend more time with him and learn from him and Damon had decided he’d very much like that.

When he was seven years old he stood perfectly still at his father’s side during an important dinner event. His hair was perfectly combed and his shirt was tucked in, and even though he wanted to be upstairs with his book he quiet and used the words he was told were polite, and his father even introduced him to an important man who let Damon shake his hand.

“You did perfectly,” his mother told him as she escorted him to bed a short while later. “I hope when your brother is born you will teach him how to be as good as you are.”

\--

Damon thought he might have found unconditional love in his mother, but he quickly came to learn that mothers could love all their children equally – even when the smaller ones haven’t done much to earn that love. Damon learned to read and was praised, yet Stefan was praised more for the accomplishment of a smile.

He thought, as Stefan grew, that this little brother might be his chance for unconditional love. His mother had two sons to love, but Stefan only had one brother. No more children followed Stefan into the family, and from the moment Stefan could walk he was following his brother around. 

“He loves you,” his mother had told him, as a frowning Stefan tried to get back onto his feet right after Damon had run too fast for him. 

Damon didn’t argue. Stefan did love him. 

When he decided later that night that no one else was coming to ease Stefan’s cries any more, Damon crossed the room of the nursery and stopped his brother’s tears himself, and realised that he actually loved his brother more than he thought he did.

\--

Damon learned to care for Stefan as he once had one himself. It’s what the eldest son did, he realised. Had Stefan been born a girl, he’d have had to learn to curl her hair if the nursemaid wasn’t around to do it, but instead Stefan’s hair fell annoyingly neatly compared to Damon’s curls. He was even better at keeping all his shirt buttons done through the day than Damon was, and he rarely got dirty while playing. 

Stefan was a good boy, and he wasn’t. Damon wasn’t as well behaved, but he wanted Stefan to be well behaved. No matter how much he attempted to gain his father’s approval he never quite achieved it. He was always too outspoken for his place, too confident, and always with his eye on the girls. Stefan was the good, perfect boy that his father craved. 

But while Damon looked to his father, Stefan looked to Damon.

“He loves you,” his father told him one day. He said it with far more annoyance in his tone than Damon cared for.

“I know.”

\--  
Damon was eighteen years old when his mother died. He promised to eulogise her and failed. Stefan was so angry at him that he wasn’t sure his brother would ever forgive him. He felt that unconditional love shatter away into a little boy’s tears of betrayal, and he knew he could never replace this moment with something better.

"You could have just said goodbye!"

No matter what came next, there would never be a way to make up for this one moment. He would never feel the permanent love of his mother again, his father looked at him like the disappointment he was, and now even his faithful brother hated him. 

He was eighteen. A man. 

He still felt like a boy.

\--

Damon thought he found a deeper unconditional love when he met Katherine. However, when he was wrong about this, he found he was wrong about Stefan too. He loses Katherine’s devotion as quickly as he loses Stefan’s loyalty, and the boy who grew to be a soldier became a little boy again very quickly. He had been angry at first that Katherine wasn’t happy enough with him that she had to bring another man into her life, but then he realised it was the man she had chosen.

Stefan. Stefan who made mother happier, father happier…and now even the woman he loved needed Stefan to make her life feel complete. 

He wondered if Stefan knew how rare unconditional love was, and if he even knew how easily people gave it to him.

\--

After that was a blur of his attempts to find unconditional love. Among nameless, faceless one-night stands was Isobel, Lexi, Rose and Rebekah. There were countless replicas of Katherine’s face and sometimes he couldn’t remember how she and Elena were similar, but when his eyes were closed and he could only feel lips and curves, he couldn’t tell them apart. 

He didn’t count Andie. She only loved him because he compelled her to. It felt good, but it wasn’t real.

Not for the first time, Damon wished he’d died instead of becoming a vampire.

\--

Damon abandoned his search for love as easily as he had once abandoned his emotions. He buried himself in bourbon and snappy sarcasm until everyone viewed him as the big bad vampire that they wanted to see him as. That was easier. No one pretended to love him, no one tore out his heart, and he discovered it was surprisingly easier to stay alive when you weren’t trying to keep anyone alive.

Except Stefan. Stefan never seemed far behind him. Without a woman between them it was as if things had never changed.

\--

Stefan died. 

Wow, that hurt more than he ever imagined it could. 

Damon knew at that moment that his search for adoration had been a wasted use of almost two hundred years of life. He’d waited to see if someone came into his life that he could love, that he could make happy, and all along he’d overlooked the one who had strived for that attention from him. 

Family, he learned, is what you always come home to. 

Love, he learned, is exactly the same.

But Stefan is dead on his couch, his face grey and drained of life, and Damon was without family or love.

\--

Damon died. 

It wasn’t a big deal.

At least, it wasn’t to him. Not if it meant that little brother got to live again. Besides, he would come back to life again and everything would be fine.

\--

Except it wasn’t fine.

\--

Things weren’t fine until they were, ironically, in the family crypt. They should have been there a long time ago on a more permanent basis, but instead they were there now, and of all the people that Damon wanted to see when he came back to life he found his little brother effortlessly. Because after all this time, all they ever did was find each other. No matter how many times the Salvatore brothers are separated, through war, through stubbornness, or through even death, they found each other. They always would. 

It didn’t matter how many years they lived, Damon would never forget the way Stefan said his name when he saw that he was alive. He filed that memory away in the same place he kept the memory of the very first time Stefan said his name. 

“It’s a hell of a long story, brother,” he said with tears he was trying to hide, approaching Stefan. That didn’t really need saying, their story had always been a long one, and now it would be an even longer one. But this was the first time in months that they had been together and one of them hadn’t been a lifeless corpse. 

Stefan clung to him as he had always done, as if Damon were his only salvation and hope. He gripped his arms around his neck like had done that time he fell in the river and Damon lifted him out. He dug his fingers into the muscles of his back like he had done as he cried for their lost mother. He let out a small sigh of disbelief as he had done when he first saw Damon alive after he had left to fight in the war. 

That’s when Damon knew that he was home; when he knew that he’d had the unconditional love of his brother all along, and that it was far stronger than anything he had felt for the women who flitted in and out of his life.

“I’m back.”

-


End file.
